I recently went to Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon) on a quick work trip, literally less than 48 hours! Funny thing – Vietnam has been on my travel radar for a while now, but it fizzled out quite recently too. Maybe sometimes watching something over and over on social media does it. Anyhow, I’ll be making more trips to Vietnam and I am pretty sure I would love many things there. Here are some things I noticed on this first trip to Ho Chi Minh City that I am itching to share:

Women clothes appear awesome in local shops: This is the number 1 pattern I literally saw from afar in so many streets. Vietnam, like India, has lot of local shops around rather than just global brands. Whenever I was sitting in a cab or on a scooter, I just kept noticing that how many random shops have such amazingly beautiful clothes. I have such deep regret in not getting the time to go venture in. 😦 This is my must do activity when I go to Ho Chi Minh City next.

Street food vendors sit near their carts! In India also, street food is pretty big. However, vendors keep standing next to their carts. I don’t know why it never happened that anyone brought stools to sit next to their carts like folks in Vietnam do. My assumption is any of the below reasons:

1. Vietnam is not as densely populated as India so its not like that the cart is having customers all the time without any breather and the vendor cannot do without standing.
2. Indian street food requires a lot of live cooking, while Vietnam I guess has more of assembling. Hence, the vendor can just stand, serve and sit down again till the next customer comes.

It was a fun thing to observe and some vendors were even wearing the traditional Vietnamese hat (Google it if you don’t know).

I was shocked about the food! I expected to love Vietnamese food since I thought there will be many readily available vegetarian options. Especially since I read online that Vietnam has a lot of Buddhist population who eat vegetarian food on certain days. Anyhow, Ho Chi Minh offers a lot of varied international cuisines but what I meant was vegetarian food was not mainstream at all. That was quite a shocker and I didn’t like the taste as much as I like Vietnamese food in Indian Vietnamese restaurants! Hahaha.

Ao Dai is so pretty & so easy to get made! Its a traditional dress for Women and I found the modern, minimal version quite pretty. It can actually be styled in various ways I feel and it accentuates people’s body structure it seems. However, what made me sit back and take notice is that there were a lot of tailor shops which means its pretty easy to get one made as per your desired customizations!

I think this post has turned more interesting than I imagined. I hope the readers also feel the same. 🙂 Would love to hear from you!